Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Intel Corporation today announced a broad strategic alliance centered on Intel's endorsement of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun's commitment to deliver a comprehensive family of enterprise and telecommunications servers and workstations based on Intel Xeon processors. The new Intel-based enterprise systems from Sun will enhance its current X64 portfolio and complement its industry-leading, powerhouse SPARC systems.

As part of today's announcement, Intel is embracing Solaris as a mainstream OS and the enterprise-class, mission critical UNIX OS for Intel Xeon processor-based servers. In a joint press conference in San Francisco today, executives from both companies announced a Solaris OEM agreement enabling Intel to distribute and support the Solaris OS to its customers as market opportunities arise.

"This alliance will substantially expand the volume opportunity of the Solaris OS and enable Intel's OEM partners to offer the most secure, credible and strategic operating system platform available today," said Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of Software. "With Xeon's significant market presence, Solaris will be available to new customers and have the chance to expand in existing accounts. And as the worldwide community of Solaris customers and contributors continues to grow across the enterprise, web-tier, and start-up markets, the ecosystem of Solaris-based solutions will expand as well."

Intel's endorsement of Solaris is good news for customers and ISVs. The Solaris platform is currently supported by over 4200 commercially available applications on 800+ platforms that deliver the essential scaling, functionality and security capable of handling explosive network growth. The combination of Sun's open source Solaris and Java development environments and the Intel architecture provides a solid platform for ISVs to develop and deliver applications and Web services in order to deliver outstanding differentiated value to enterprise customers. Intel and Sun will strongly encourage ISVs and system providers to expand their offerings for Solaris on their Intel-based systems, and Intel will support Sun in its efforts to optimize applications for Solaris on Xeon.

Sun Plans Family of Intel Xeon Processor-based Systems
In other news, Sun announced its decision to complement its current offerings with Intel-architecture based Xeon platforms optimized for Solaris beginning in 2007. The combination of Solaris and Java on Xeon processors is expected to deliver impressive levels of performance to the Intel Xeon server marketplace while providing greater security and choice for customers.

Sun executives said the company plans to deliver uni-, dual- and multi-processor based enterprise servers, telecommunication servers and workstations. The first Intel Xeon-based systems that support Solaris, Windows and Linux are expected in the first half of 2007.Source: Sun Microsystems